Nonfiction

So, no, I do not have a white name. I wish other non-white people didn’t either. Our names are beautiful. They speak of our roots, cultures, homes we so dearly love. I would rather repeat my name thrice than cut it to make someone else more comfortable.

Queers are outraged about the proposed regulation of poppers—and the restriction of its recreational use. And rightly so. The arguments against these regulations are convincing—it’s your body and your choice to ingest whatever substance you like. But every new prohibition on social behaviours comes from somewhere and we should ask what made regulating poppers possible in the first place, to properly critique these immoral policies.

Demitra Lazarakis on why education matters to her Art by Nicola Dobinson I remember a moment vividly from when I was around 15 years old. I had spent the afternoon with my grandparents— Grandma Cornelia and Grandpa George, γιαγιά and παππού in Greek. On this particular day, I noticed one of my grandma’s […]

Shakespeare once said, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.” Although, he was probably referring to white names because we all know that Rose rolls off the tongue a lot easier than Mishti does.

IMAGE by David Zeleznikow-Johnston FOR by Lockout Lockheed Students at the University of Melbourne ought to be informed about a lot of things. First, that their university is making secretive deals with transnational arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and BAE. Second, that these partnerships incentivise war by institutionalising and normalising the presence of weapons […]

By the end of it, Mary didn’t feel any love toward the sheep. She didn’t want to hold their slimy bodies, cold and wet, abandoned by their mothers. Most didn’t even know how to suckle properly. She had given up trying to help lost lambs.

Roughly 9,000 years ago, somewhere around the Tehuacan Valley of present-day Mexico, a common local wildgrass began an extraordinary transformation. It probably started by accident: local foragers favouring those plants with larger, looser seeds, and inadvertently spreading them through their waste. But it wasn’t long before humans made art out of chance and began deliberately selecting the best grasses to sow—and unwittingly became the world’s first genetic engineers.

In 2008, humans became a majority urban species for the first time. Today, up to 54 per cent of people live in cities, and that number is only set to rise. Climate change will impact the cities and towns we live in—many urban areas will have to change significantly, and rapidly, in order to withstand the pressures of increasing dangerous weather events, heat waves, and other climatic dangers.

UMSU and the media office are located in the city of Melbourne, on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. We pay our respects to their elders—past, present and emerging—and acknowledge that the land we are on was stolen and sovereignty was never ceded.